Wednesday, May 16, 2007

About "Bernie's Notebook"

For those of you curious about Sheldon Mayer's Sugar & Spike story "Bernie's Notebook" which I ran across the last week (since removed since a bunch of the image links were broken), it was a three page story that was auctioned by Heritage Comics recently (registration required to see the details and full scans). It was among the stories that Mayer did in the early 1980s for foreign publishers, some of which were published in DC's digest comics of the era, but most of which have never been published in English in any format. It's a delightful little story, made all the more so when I cross-checked and verified that it neither appeared in any of the digests or on any list of the unpublished stories I had. Since I've been wanting to post some more stuff on Mayer here, and since the story seemed to work so well split into tiers, I figured I'd show it here (the original scans at Heritage are still worth taking a look at, with the blue-line editorial corrections which I cleaned up).

Anyway, while the story isn't quite to the level of Mayer's best, it's a good sample of his work. The pacing of the joke is great, the body language amazing (I love Sugar's glower and reaction shot on the last page), and I like how he sneaks in a gratuitous "Spike being knocked down" gag.

Hope you enjoyed, whether S&S is new to you or if you thought you'd read it all. If you'd like to see more, consider my recommendation in the last post about letting DC and your retailer know about it. There's over 3000 pages of material they have to work with, almost all of it unseen in over three decades, plus a few thousand more pages of Mayer's SCRIBBLY and funny animal work, enough to keep a robust publishing plan occupied for years.